Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Well, I mean, I don't think that you can draw the conclusion from a single modest proposal that was designed to address people on modest incomes getting some kind of a break prompted by the fact that very high earners had all of the reliefs that we have just been speaking about since we started. They could minimise their tax liability or mitigate it. The small person trapped in PAYE and so on could not. So, you know, it was a measure that, I think, in terms of trying to analyse what caused the banking crash, it might not, in your view, have been good fiscal policy but it was of piddling insignificance in terms of what caused the crash.